Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

Abstract

This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the might/will distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of might through two prosodic tunes (prosody condition). Positive and negative valence conditions were included. Younger children were shown to start off performing above chance for the modal condition, and at around chance for the prosody condition, but after age four performance on the prosody condition quickly improved. For both modal verbs and prosody, children performed significantly better when valence was positive. By age seven, children performed at ceiling for all conditions. Qualitative analysis of children's justifications for prosody responses showed metalinguistic awareness of prosodic meaning as early as age four, with the ability to relate prosody to epistemic modal meaning becoming quite common by age seven.

Might and might not: Children's conceptual development and the acquisition of modal verbs

“…Some 4.5-to 6-year-olds distinguish what has to be the case from what may be the case (Öztürk & Papafragou (2015), experiments 1 and 2), and some and 4-to 5.5-year-olds distinguish what is the case from what may be the case (Öztürk & Papafragou (2015), experiment 3). A small proportion of 3-year-olds might distinguish what will happen from what might happen (Armstrong 2020). We have shown that some 4-year-olds distinguish what can happen from what has to happen.…”

The role of intonation and context in lack of necessity meanings in negated deontic necessity modals in child Romanian

“…It is unclear how children behave in this respect. Nevertheless, prosody has been shown to modulate the interpretation of modals in both adults and children, in particular, in identifying epistemic stances such as disbelief (Armstrong 2014(Armstrong , 2020. For instance, when hearing two twins react to a statement in two different ways (with a neutral echo or a disbelief echo), children were able to accurately identify the twin who distrusted the speaker to a great extent, though not fully adult-like.…”